Hi, > What is the plan for packages that are made specifically for MySQL, but > happen to currently work > with MariaDB in Debian? On the Ubuntu side, I would like them to continue > depending on MySQL with as > little delta as possible. The best way to do that would probably be to either > keep those packages in > unstable if they need to depend on libmysqlclient-dev or mysql-server, or use > the OR operator in the > dependency, such as `mysql-server | mariadb-server` with mysql-server listed > first.
I don't think we need to restrict any current packages to unstable. If they are already in testing, they have proven to work with MariaDB. The second part of your suggestion seems like the most sensible thing to do: if a package is deemed to be "made specifically for MySQL" it probably makes sense for them to declare, for example, 'Recommends: mysql-server | mariadb-server'. I am also keen to see what maintainers of various packages respond, and if there actually are any open source projects left that target only MySQL and not MariaDB. Some projects might also have some built-in heuristics to detect what database engine and version they are interacting with. Also, there is the dimension of not just having to think of MariaDB and MySQL differences, but also version differences within the same database engine as new versions may drop features or become incompatible with their own older versions. For now I will focus on monitoring the bug reports and see what details might surface.
